12/12/09 Reflections

The 12/12/09 day was great. We began in Dr. Van's class actually viewing some video footage of Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind" on Youtube. It was definitely beneficial to see him presenting his book. It brought the book to life. I enjoyed this experience and it was a revelation to me as well to remember to incorporate different classroom strategies in my classroom so students can keep up their interest in Orchestra class. Some questions we were asked to consider over the next month was: 1. What does these strategies mean to me as a teacher? 2. How can this thought be incorporated in my class? 3. In my classroom, I could do... 4. As guided practice I could....... 5. As a follow-up ............

I personally enjoyed the discussion and ideas from Daniel Pink's book that we did on "story". Some suggestions that were made for this particular strategy was about using photo finish technique. The suggestion was to put a picture of a violin with a baseball cap and allow students to complete the story or backstory of the image. Another suggestion was to display a picture of someone holding a violin. Have the student critique the left and right hand posture of the person in the picture. I did a similar activity with my class by dividing the class into four groups. I had each group to take a picture and complete the backstory. They really enjoyed this activity and were very involved in the classroom discussion about their picture.

Another instructional piece using the "story" strategy was to have the students to play a piece of music in the key of C or D. Ask the questions "What's going on in this piece?" "What is the composer trying to convey?" "What type of movie would go with this recording?" The music becomes the "Once upon a time" of the story.